Law Commons^™

Criminal Trespass And Computer Crime, Laurent Sacharoff

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) criminalizes the simple act of trespass upon a computer—intentional access without authorization. The law sweeps too broadly, but the courts and scholars seeking to fix it look in the wrong place. They uniformly focus on the term “without authorization” when instead they should focus on the statute’s mens rea. On a conceptual level, courts and scholars understand that the CFAA is a criminal law, of course, but fail to interpret it comprehensively as one.

This Article begins the first sustained treatment of the CFAA as a criminal law, with a full elaboration of …

Web Of Lives: How Regulating The Dark Web Can Combat Online Human Trafficking, Christopher Campbell

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

This article argues that one of the ways to appropriately fight online human trafficking is through governmental regulation of the Dark Web. Specifically, this article argues that a new Attaching Criminal Dark Web Statute is the best method to combat human trafficking because it can incentivize prosecutors to use current human trafficking statutes to prosecute traffickers. This proposal can deter traffickers from enslaving people. Additionally, this article shows the evolution of online human trafficking laws, investigation, and prosecution (Section II); demonstrates why current and proposed laws do not effectively address the online human trafficking issue (Sections III and IV); introduces …

Authority And Authors And Codes, Michael J. Madison

Articles

Contests over the meaning and application of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”) expose long-standing, complex questions about the sources and impacts of the concept of authority in law and culture. Accessing a computer network “without authorization” and by “exceeding authorized access” is forbidden by the CFAA. Courts are divided in their interpretation of this language in the statute. This Article first proposes to address the issue with an insight from social science research. Neither criminal nor civil liability under the CFAA should attach unless the alleged violator has transgressed some border or boundary that is rendered visible …

A Code-Based Approach To Unauthorized Access Under The Computer Fraud Abuse Act, Patricia L. Bellia

Journal Articles

Thirty years ago, Congress passed the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) to combat the emerging problem of computer crime. The statute’s core prohibitions targeted one who “accesses” a computer “without authorization” or who “exceeds authorized access.” Over time, incremental statutory changes and large-scale technical changes have dramatically expanded the potential scope of the CFAA. The question of what constitutes unauthorized access has taken on far greater significance than it had thirty years ago, and courts remain deeply divided on this question. This Article explores the text, purpose, and history of the CFAA, as well as a range of normative …

Finding The Solution In Wec Carolina Energy Solutions: The Computer Fraud And Abuse Act In The Workplace, Emily V. Malone

Catholic University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Criminalizing Hacking, Not Dating: Reconstructing The Cfaa Intent Requirement, David Thaw

Articles

Cybercrime is a growing problem in the United States and worldwide. Many questions remain unanswered as to the proper role and scope of criminal law in addressing socially-undesirable actions affecting and conducted through the use of computers and modern information technologies. This Article tackles perhaps the most exigent question in U.S. cybercrime law, the scope of activities that should be subject to criminal sanction under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the federal "anti-hacking" statute.

At the core of current CFAA debate is the question of whether private contracts, such as website "Terms of Use" or organizational "Acceptable Use …